Tech Support, Remote Access and Adsense Fraud

Here’s a new little twist to the old Click Fraud drama that the Adsense team spend their days combatting.

Nishant introduces himself over at DigitalPoint as a manager for HP Technical Support. He later tells me privately that he’s cooked up a scheme where he and his team will click my Adsense Ads during remote access support sessions on their client’s computers.

So what does this mean?

It means that during the day he’ll be accessing the computers of North American HP customers and helping them resolve problems. He’ll probably say “lets do a check of how this looks” and pull up a browser and quickly type in a website address and then clicks on the ad before the customer even knows what has happened.

The customer won’t be worried though, it’s Hewlett Packard accessing the computer – what could possibly go wrong?

HP should be worried – if their tech support agents are abusing the trust their customers have in them then anything could happen – including planting trojans or other malware.

Adsense should be worried – these adsense clicks will be coming from a wide range of IPs and will be hard to detect on sites with alot of traffic.

The only flags will probably be the length of time on the page before the click, always coming from the home page (most likely), and that the ad clicked will not “match” the other ads clicked by the user – something the tech support guy can’t possibly know.

In the meantime – if you are tempted by this type of scheme – remember, fraud is fraud and it’s just not worth it.